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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28387905">Muse</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Broken_Twisted_Lullabies/pseuds/Broken_Twisted_Lullabies'>Broken_Twisted_Lullabies</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Artist Castiel (Supernatural), Canon Temporary Character Death, Castiel and Dean Winchester Have a Profound Bond, Castiel is not an angel, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Human Castiel (Supernatural), Implied/Referenced Character Death, Prophet AU, Prophet Castiel (Supernatural), Prophetic Dreams, Prophetic Visions, canon adjacent, do not copy to another site</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 14:35:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,605</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28387905</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Broken_Twisted_Lullabies/pseuds/Broken_Twisted_Lullabies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>His life is but flashes Castiel has remembered from dreams, recreated in monochrome, if only so that Cas could prove this man wasn’t made up. After all, he’s certain he’s alive, that he’s someone out there that Cas just can’t get out of his head: he’s stuck with Cas too long to be fictional. And yet -- and it sounds silly in Cas’ head -- he’s never met the man. Someone he has drawn and painted for at least a decade, one that’s haunted his dreams even longer, and he didn’t even know his name.<br/>---</p>
<p>Ever since he was young, Cas has been haunted by this phantom of a man, both in his dreams and in the real world. No matter what Cas does, where he goes, the man is there too. In every mirror, every reflection, in puddles and car windows and the faintest reflection of Cas in the metal pitcher at restaurants. He's certain the man isn't the result of an overactive imagination or a ghost with unfinished business, but if he really is experiencing someone else's dreams, why is it only this stranger that Cas sees in his dreams and no one else?  [Prophet AU]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Castiel &amp; Dean Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Muse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was a secret santa gift I made for someone on the SPN amino app, destiel1967, whose favourite colour was sky blue and character Castiel. </p>
<p>This fic was kinda a mash up of that one scene in NBC's Constantine at the end of episode 1 with Zed being surrounded by all the sketches and drawings of John, plus how SPN worked in elements of prophets and prophetic powers in the series, especially with dreams and art forms. I ultimately decided to remove Chuck from being a prophet and replaced him with Cas, but focusing on the fact that Cas and Dean have a profound bond (hence why he can only see Dean, not Sam as well).</p>
<p>(also the whole bonfire thing I learned online. Apparently bonfires originate from bone-fyres/fires, where near the end of the year/close to winter, they would build fires and burn bones of the deceased/animals believing it would purify and ward away evil spirits. Kinda like how supernatural uses the whole "salt-and-burning" of dead bodies in the show) </p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The stranger haunts not only Cas’ dreams, but every waking moment too. No matter what Cas does, where he goes, the man is there too. In every mirror, every reflection, in puddles and car windows and the faintest reflection of Cas in the metal pitcher at restaurants. Everywhere Cas is, the man is, following as a shadow, lingering like a spirit, the figure over his shoulder in the mirror. It sounds insane, and Cas is aware no sane person experienced such a thing. But it’s not a ghost -- he’s researched about ghosts and how to find them (and eventually release them from Earth), and none of what he’s experienced matches. The temperature doesn’t drop when his spectre appears, lights don’t flicker, tossing salt over his shoulder just leaves behind a mess. By all logic, whatever haunts him isn’t tangible.</p>
<p>And that doesn’t help Cas’ case.</p>
<p>If anything, he knows it’ll make him look like he’s had a psychotic break, like his mental health is through the fritz. If Cas breathed one word of this phantom, he’s certain he’d be shoved in the car and driven to the nearest psychologist by his brother, and that is not what he wants to deal with. So Cas wisely chose not to speak of his stranger like that, like a ghost that lingers with him -- after all, he’s too old for an imaginary friend (not that this could be one anyways), and hallucinations are the only other option. Instead, he just lets this man remain just out of reach, lets him wander into his dreams and linger in his periphery.</p>
<p>Besides, the man is not cruel. He carries himself like a soldier, and sometimes he looks angry or bitter but never has he hurt Cas. Sometimes he smiles, sometimes he almost seems to be laughing. And, sometimes, he just looks sad.</p>
<p>Cas frowns as his paintbrush stills in his hand, hovering just above the canvas. A half-finished face stares back at him, eyebrows furrowed, mouth tilted down in a frown. Unlike some of his other paintings featuring this stranger, this one just feels fuzzy around the edges. Some dreams Cas remembers clearly, others, it’s like looking through a fogged window -- only the faintest of details visible. In this particular painting, the lighting on the stranger’s face is dramatic. Cas doesn’t know where he is, or what he’s wearing. All he knows is it’s like the man is looking at a fire, and if he closes his eyes, he can smell the smokiness of the fire, feel the heat of the flames on his skin.</p>
<p><em>But why are you sad?</em> He wonders.</p>
<p>All of Cas’ memories of campfires have been positive ones: drinking and singing loudly with friends, roasting marshmallows and telling scary stories with his brother, camping out under the stars with university buddies.</p>
<p>Perhaps, he reasons it’s because of the first time Cas dreamt of the man, who had been a boy at the time. Or, maybe the stranger views bonfires more superstitiously, the burning of bones to purify and ward away evil spirits.</p>
<p>Cas is not sure, but either way, he knows his questions will never be answered by the painting. Drawn on scrap sheets of paper in graphite, sketched out in harsh lines in charcoal, painted softly in acrylics or pastels, this man lives in Cas’ sketchbooks and on canvas and bristol, alive only in the sense of a painter’s muse. His life is but flashes Castiel has remembered from dreams, recreated in monochrome, if only so that Cas could prove this man wasn’t made up. After all, he’s certain he’s alive, that he’s someone out there that Cas just can’t get out of his head: he’s stuck with Cas too long to be fictional. And yet -- and it sounds silly in Cas’ head -- he’s never met the man. Someone he has drawn and painted for at least a decade, one that’s haunted his dreams even longer, and he didn’t even know his name.</p>
<p>He sighs, putting down the paintbrush and rubbing his face. He’s certain immediately after doing this that the paint on his fingers has now migrated to his face, but Cas could care less. Expecting to never get dirty when doing art is like telling a singer to stand stalk-still while singing at their concert. Impossible.</p>
<p>“Why is it just you, I see?” He asks the painting, the words hovering in the air of his small studio. There are other people in his dreams, sure, but they have no features, existing nothing more than a vague form. They interact with his stranger, sure, but it’s like Cas’ dreams have focused only on the stranger and nothing else.</p>
<p>Painted only in shades of blue, the stranger stares back. Silent, grief written in his features. In the back of his mind, something makes Cas’ fingers itch to pick back up the paintbrush, to fix whatever mistake mars the handsome half finished face of his ghost, but he knows if he picks up the brush, the itch will be gone. So he leaves it be, moving away from the canvas to close the jars of paint. Then, dropping the brush in a cup of water to clean later, Cas spares the painting one last glance.</p>
<p><em>Who are you?</em> He thinks.</p>
<hr/>
<p>The first time Cas saw the stranger in his dreams, he was five.</p>
<p>He couldn’t remember the dream all too well, after all, it had been nearly twenty-five years ago, and dreams alone were finicky things sometimes. Didn’t always want to be remembered, his father would say. But what Cas can remember of this dream he was standing on the grass and it was dark and there was a house with fire coming out one of the windows. Hot, angry flames licking up the walls of the room, thick grey smoke curling out of the window, and a little boy -- his stranger -- running out of the house. He was cradling something against his chest, and had stopped right besides five-year-old Cas, turning to look back at the house.</p>
<p>The boy’s face was only a smudge and it was like Cas was looking at him through a dirty window. What details he couldn’t see of the boy made up for the fact the boy was scared. Not scared like when he had been in the car with his mother and father and brother and they were driving to school and his father slammed on the breaks quickly to avoid hitting a car that had run a red light, jolting Cas at the dead-stop. No, this was worse. It was like when he had once wandered down the aisle of the grocery store without realizing his mom hadn’t been following and he turned around to be all alone, surrounded by strangers.</p>
<p>That was what he felt from the boy. Scared that his family was gone. That they were stuck in the fire.</p>
<p>Then there was an explosion and the boy’s dad is running out of the house, and Cas wakes up screaming. The explosion wasn’t anything like in the movies his older brother had watched. It wasn’t cool. It was loud and scary and Cas remembers his parents rushing into his room, his father flicking on the lights, his mother pulling him in close as he sobbed into her nightshirt. For the next week, Cas slept in his parents’ bed, afraid he’d close his eyes and have the nightmare with the house on fire and the scared little boy again.</p>
<p>(His brother was banned from watching any action movies with explosions for a <em>month</em>.)</p>
<hr/>
<p>Since then, he had had flashes of that little boy in his dreams. It was never a proper picture, instead flashes of scenes like he was watching a movie with someone too impatient that they just kept pressing the skip button. Just bits and pieces here and there Cas remembered, but as he got older, the boy became less blurry. The fuzzy silhouette he had seen at five became clearer, gained features and details, and suddenly he felt more real.</p>
<p>When he was younger, the boy was dubbed as an imaginary friend by his parents. Little Cas would sit at the kitchen table, scribbling away with crayons on a sheet of construction paper, regaling to his mother about the adventures the boy in his dreams went on. His mother, like any parent, would smile and ask the appropriate questions here and there, and Cas would easily chatter away about the boy, about his big black car and how he got to travel the world. Cas also would tell her how he hoped that maybe he’d stop by their house to visit too.</p>
<p>“I’m sure he will, my sweet,” his mother would say as she cooked, and Cas would nod, agreeing.</p>
<p>But as he grew older, he soon began to realize children are supposed to grow out of imaginary friends and so Cas, who seemed to be the exception, decided to not talk about the boy in his dreams anymore. He still had them, and as he got older they happened more frequently, and they got worse. There were dreams where Cas woke up, clutching his chest, panicking because it had felt like he couldn’t breathe. <em>Why couldn’t he breathe?</em></p>
<p>Other nights, the dreams were kinder.</p>
<p>It was also when he got to high school that the man in his dreams seemed to bleed into the waking world, appearing first in mirrors, face peeking out from over his shoulder. Then it was puddles and at the pool and more and more he bled into Castiel’s life, going from the cruddy stick figure scribbled in sky blue crayon to a spectre that couldn’t move on. And Cas, who couldn’t talk to anyone about this, tried to turn towards a creative outlet to shove this stranger into, hoping that if he did something the man would go away.</p>
<p>But Cas was no writer. He had no way with words, and so to write about this man was futile. Besides, what story features a character without a name?</p>
<p>(One might argue Cas could just make up a name for the stranger and move on, but every time he tried it felt wrong.)</p>
<p>So he turned to art. He drew the stranger and bits of his memories on loose sheets of paper before moving to sketchbooks, and from there, it snowballed into other mediums. This need and frustration to put the man in his dreams someplace real, led to Cas joining art classes both at school and at his local community centre. It was cartooning and realism and everything in between, painting lessons in watercolour and acrylic, the mixing of art styles that evolved from a need to prove himself not insane to a passion for visual arts. And where his brother went off to study architecture, Castiel went to study fine art.</p>
<hr/>
<p>His spectre followed him to Chicago, but Cas didn’t mind. If he tried hard enough, he could forget about the man during the day, seeing him only in his dreams. He’d sketch him sometimes between class work, often either dynamic portraits in charcoal or random places he recognized from his dreams, and where his family might’ve thought he was crazy, his friends thought the stranger from Cas’ dreams -- his muse, they called him -- was fascinating.</p>
<p>With a smile and elevated spirits, Cas found the next three years past in a blur of colours and fun, and despite the odd nightmare here or there, his dreams were kinder than usual. There was the odd couple of days where he got bad nightmares that left him waking up shouting, panting like he had run a marathon, others it was just an uneasiness that he could explain. Once even, it was a chill that lingered for a full month, that despite it being July, Cas felt like it was late November. Despite all that, Cas graduated with his friends, his final project based on various popular creatures from different myths -- they seemed to keep popping up in his dreams and it was almost like it made sense, he figured -- and everything was okay.</p>
<p>For a while, he lived in a small shoebox of an apartment in Chicago, alternating between selling his art and teaching lessons for children at the local rec centres. It wasn’t always glamourous, but when the nightmares happened more often, with his dreams being darker and filled with unease, it helped keep his mind off of things.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Until one day the man was gone. After a year of uneasiness and dreams filled with worry and defeat, Cas went to bed and found the stranger was not in his dreams.</p>
<p>There had been times before the man would have faded in Castiel’s dreams, blurring it seemed into the background like he hadn’t quite existed, but he had always been there. If not in the dream, then in the waking world with Cas. But, for the first time in years, Castiel’s stranger was gone. Gone from mirror reflections and puddles and reflections in glass windows. He was gone and everything was suddenly cold and dark and loud. <em>Oh god, it was so loud in Cas’ dreams now.</em></p>
<p>Whenever he closed his eyes he was just screaming and yelling, and the first time he had heard it all, he had woken up gasping for air, tears running down his cheeks. Sitting in bed, Cas had drawn his knees up to his chest, curling shaking arms around them, feeling like he had fallen asleep outside in the dead of winter. The blankets pooled around him, offering warmth and shelter but Cas couldn’t focus on them. All he felt was scared. He couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t stop the tears, couldn’t chase away the loneliness. And that repeated each time he went to sleep. Again and again, like a cycle that Cas couldn’t break.</p>
<p>After the third night of it, Cas stared into the dark, sniffling. Come back, he begged his stranger. I don’t like it there.</p>
<p>But the stranger didn’t. And so Cas didn’t sleep for a week.</p>
<p>Everytime he closed his eyes, he was back there -- in the cold, in the dark, in the loud place -- and it was just too much. So he turned to art and coffee to try and chase this all away. To wait for his stranger to come back and get rid of these horrible nightmares. It wasn’t healthy, and there were days that Cas collapsed into bed too exhausted to dream and got a few hours of sleep, but nothing helped the sudden Hell he seemed to be stuck in. So when he was awake or the nightmares were really bad, he painted, creating a series of paintings of bits of his stranger he remembered because for the first time in ages he wanted him back.</p>
<p>
  <em>(A burning house with a tree in the yard...</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...A big black car gleaming in the sun…</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...His stranger standing in a room with a green and black mesmerizing swirl...</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>…A tent with a pale faced man and his stranger...</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...A hand holding a bottle of whiskey...</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...A strange knife...</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...A hand with a silver ring holding a strange horned pendant on a thread...</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...A sleek black and silver gun…</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...A scrap yard…)</em>
</p>
<p>All places that seemed important enough to his stranger that Cas hoped it would bring him back. By the end of two weeks of barely enough sleep and all-nighters, Cas found himself with a collection of twelve paintings, each one a bit of his missing stranger (but still his stranger was gone).</p>
<p>The paintings sit in his small living room, and when a concerned friend stops by to check on Cas, he sees them and remarks that Cas should hold a small show.</p>
<p>“I know you’re not one for showing off,” Andy said as they stood in his little kitchenette, leaning on the counter while Cas sat on a small stool, “but these are good Cas. Like, really good. Besides, they look sick and it might help you get a bit more recognition.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” Cas admitted, cautious and tired. He rubbed his face, trying not to yawn. “You really think people will find this stuff interesting? I mean, it's just a bunch of random stuff. None of it even seems to make sense.”</p>
<p>His friend shrugged. “I mean, it does a little. Like the journal with those pages on monsters? And the whole pentagram and weird amulet thing? Dude I can definitely see you having a few interested folks.” When he saw the apprehension in Cas’ face, he added, “I know a guy. It’s not anything big, but he does local art shows. Lets a couple of artists use his art gallery once a month to showcase a few pieces and if he likes them enough, they get to hang around longer. If anything, just consider it.”</p>
<p>“Fine. Okay, I’ll consider it. But you really think he’d want twelve paintings? It seems a bit much.”</p>
<p>Andy gives him an easy grin. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk with him. Just trust me on this.”</p>
<p>Cas nods.</p>
<p>From there, it’s still sleepless nights, but after a month of silence, Andy comes back and tells him his buddy offered Cas a spot at his gala. And Cas, despite being hesitant and uncertain about all this, caves and agrees. After all, he figures it’s just one day. His art is hardly anything special, and it’s not public worthy. But, apparently he’s wrong as visitors eat it up -- loving each of his paintings, asking questions behind the focus of each individual painting, and for a moment he feels less lonely. It makes him feel almost like his stranger is still there.</p>
<p>That one day turns into a month as Cas’ works hang in one section of the gala with other artists and a few he reluctantly sells, willing himself to part with them for good once the show is done. His stranger has been gone now three months and Cas’ sleep schedule has been slightly better, but only just. There’s still the screams, the darkness, the cold, and when it gets too much he returns to his paintings. To his sketches of his stranger and on the three month anniversary of the disappearance of his stranger, just as Cas is ready to accept his stranger is gone for good, he returns. And so Cas adds one final painting to the series.</p>
<p>It’s the largest in the series, and Cas had called in Righteous, a title that fits rightly so. Done almost initially in a panic, as if Cas were convinced this was the very last time his stranger might return to his dreams, the background is a dark wine colour, filled with harsh strokes of various shades of red. It’s darker, angrier than his other paintings, but it’s the lonely cold dark place Cas had nightmares about for months, and to contrast the harshness, is a lone figure in the centre. Painted a brilliant sky blue, his stranger stands tall and mighty with a grim look on his face, eyes dark and wild. In one hand, he holds a long silver weapon, and he holds himself like he always does: as a soldier, ready to fight.</p>
<p>It’s nearly identical to his dream, except Cas had taken broken pieces of glass from an old picture frame he had accidentally knocked over and shattered, and pasted them in a circle around the man’s head, their sharp edges facing outwards. It looks almost like a crown, to Cas, and while he doesn’t know for certain why he did this, it feels right.</p>
<p>“He looks like an avenging angel,” one woman said to Castiel, gesturing to the painting. It had only recently been placed amongst the others, and it had definitely gotten the most attention of all his paintings. “It’s almost like that’s a halo around his head. All he’s missing is the wings.”</p>
<p>Cas looks back at the painting and squints. He tilts his head, and for a moment, he sees it.</p>
<p>“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”</p>
<p>He doesn’t sell the painting, choosing to keep that one for himself to allow it to lean against the wall of his living room, and every time Cas passes it, he finds something doesn’t sit quite right with it. But he can never put his finger on it, and it’s a feeling that follows him even a year later with every piece of art he makes of his stranger.</p>
<hr/>
<p>After four months of those horrible nightmares where the man would vanish in and out of them, the cold, lonely place is gone. No more nightmares, no more cold, no more shouting.</p>
<p>Cas weeps in relief.</p>
<p>He also sleeps better that night for the first time in ages.</p>
<hr/>
<p>There are moments where the dreams are nightmares, but they are far-and-in-between since those four months, and Cas has found a way to get back to his normal life (as normal as it could be in all this, mind you). The half-finished blue painting still sits in his studio, and Cas has yet to pick up a brush and finish it, even two weeks after having started it -- every time he looks at it, it just feels wrong. Like something is missing.</p>
<p>Sitting in his living room, holding a mug filled with still-warm coffee, Cas stares out the window of his small apartment. He had woken up not too long ago, and the remnants of sleep still clung to him, leaving everything still feeling soft and fuzzy. His dream last night had been a peculiar one: unlike most places in his dreams, he never recognized them. Some were non-descript places, like motel rooms or gas stations or forests, and others were towns and scrap yards -- all places Cas had decided long ago he’d never bother to know the exact location of. It’d create too much of a headache, obsessively checking each and every place to put a pin in a giant map of the country to try and map where his stranger was traveling.</p>
<p>Last night, however, Cas had found himself in the backseat of the big black car his stranger always drove, and the man was grinning, mouth moving along to music Cas couldn’t quite hear. Next to him, in the passenger seat, sat a different man, a few years younger than his stranger, but strangely, he wasn’t a fuzzy blur of a person. He had almost more details, a sharper outline, some features even, which was only the beginning of the peculiar dream. The man in the passenger seat was leafing through sheets of papers, appearing to be talking as well (words Cas still could not hear), and so Cas had looked out the window at the landscape speeding by. This had been the first time his dream had been so sharp, so clear and it almost was like colour was starting to bleed into it as well, washed out and pale, but still there.</p>
<p>What the hell? Cas wondered, confused.</p>
<p>His eyes then caught a sign out the window, and his eyes widened.</p>
<p><em>Welcome to Chicago</em> the sign said, bright white letters against a washed-out green. Cas blinked, surprised because never once had his stranger in his dreams ever come this close to him. And now, they were practically in the same city.</p>
<p>His stranger was here, and that was what left Cas’ mind reeling. He could prove for real that this ghost of his for twenty-five years was alive and real and …. Cas jumped, cursing as he spilt coffee on his lap.</p>
<p>“Shit,” he muttered, putting the now empty mug on the small table beside his battered couch, slowly getting up as to not then spill some coffee on his carpet.</p>
<p>Moving towards the kitchen, he grabbed a towel to uselessly pat at his damp pyjama pants. There was no point trying to dry them off, and with a resigned sigh, made his way to his bedroom to get dressed and throw the ruined pyjamas in his laundry bin to deal with later. Had to get up anyway and go to one of his classes he had today, so it wasn’t like his day was completely ruined. Just, he’d be there a lot earlier than usual.</p>
<hr/>
<p>When the class was done, Cas found himself moving with the rest of the crowd down the sidewalk, aiming to grab a coffee to have before tackling the work he had waiting back for him at his apartment. Only recently he had gotten a couple of commissions from a friend for their parents’ fiftieth anniversary and Cas had been hoping to have the paintings done before the weekend. As well, Mark, who ran the art gala Cas had first displayed his stuff at months ago had been asking Cas if he’d be willing to help out with some art show thing next week and Cas had agreed all too easily to it. So, safe to say, his next few days were packed, and it was already Thursday.</p>
<p>Hence, the need for coffee.</p>
<p>Cas, with practiced ease, slipped into the nearest coffee shop, got his usual drink and was walking out the door in near-record timing before bumping into something rather solid. He had been so distracted with how he’d do his next couple of paintings, his mind also focused partly on his dream from last night and his stranger, and he hadn’t even realized he had walked right into someone who was walking into the coffee shop.</p>
<p>“Crap, I’m so sorry,” Cas said, the apology falling right out of his mouth before he even looked up to meet the man.</p>
<p>“Hey, it’s all good. Don’t worry.”</p>
<p>Cas looked up at him, ready to disagree, but he found himself speechless, eyes wide.</p>
<p>That’s what he got wrong.</p>
<p><em>(It was blue. His stranger’s eyes were never blue.)</em>They were green.</p>
<p>Cas’ stranger smiles, as charming and handsome as ever, and it’s a smile Cas knows by heart. It’s one that’s filled hundreds of pages of sketchbooks, it’s part of a mouth he’s drawn snarling and yelling and grinning and upset, and yet it feels new all the same.</p>
<p>“I’m Dean, by the way,” his stranger continues casually, oblivious to the revelation Cas is currently having.</p>
<p>He’s finally found his stranger. After twenty-five years, and by some strange luck in a city with a population of 8.8 million, he’s found the man who’s haunted Cas’ dreams and living world like a phantom, like a dead lost lover who can’t quite move on.</p>
<p>“I’m Cas,” he replies, sounding a bit breathless. He gives his stranger, Dean, a smile back.</p>
<p>“Well, Cas,” Dean says, his smile turning flirty and Cas realizes he quite likes the sound of his name coming from Dean’s mouth, “I feel bad for bumping into you and spilling your drink. Can I buy you a new one?”</p>
<p>In all this, Cas hadn’t once realized his drink was currently spilt just over the coffee shop’s entrance. He had been too focused on the man in front of him, of seeing him finally in colour and hearing his voice, and so he numbly nodded. “I uh, yeah. Sure.” Cas swallows, giving himself a mental shake.</p>
<p><em>Don’t let him get away just yet</em>, he told himself.</p>
<p>“That sounds nice,” he finishes, trying to sound more confident. Dean’s smile grows, and Cas feels his following, knowing his ear tips are definitely a bit pink.</p>
<p>But it’s okay because here’s his stranger: the man Cas feels he knows almost as much as himself. And, just maybe he might be able to learn a bit more as to why they seem connected.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Ultimately whether Cas is a human with powers or a fallen angel is kinda up to you. I never hinted at either one and instead chose to keep in ambiguous because why not? I like to imagine after this, somehow Dean finds out about the paintings and is like,,,, Cas what the hell? So Cas has to explain everything to him and somehow Cas ends up involved with them, joining Dean and Sam on the road and the series kinda continues vaguely from there with a few elements changed. </p>
<p>If you guys liked this, leave a comment and let me know! Kudos' are also appreciated! I'll try and put a few more fics up in the next couple of weeks before classes start and I hope everyone's having a decent decemeber!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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